Tuesday, July 11, 2017

I am always amazed and amused at how many serious gardeners live next door to their polar opposite. You know what I mean: one house is planted from side to side and front to back while the neighboring property hasn't much in the way of greenery other than grass.

We saw another instance of this pattern on a recent tour of gardens of members of the Wisconsin Hardy Plant Society. Before we enjoyed the garden we'd come to see, Mark could not resist a few shots of the next-door neighbor's property.

Mark managed to sneak a peek at the person's back yard and discovered a tiny vegetable garden well-caged against critters. Personally I was surprised that someone with that much grass would have had a gravel driveway rather than one with a sharply edged concrete surface.

Don't know when I've seen that much mown grass that wasn't a golf course! Maintaining a garden is a lot more fun.

Friday, June 09, 2017

We saw these two resident creatures in the gardens we visited with the WHPS earlier this week. The first one nicely suggests the quality of that owner's garden but the second one seemed a bit of an anomaly in that garden. A nice pair of birds nevertheless.

Thursday, June 08, 2017

Every summer the Wisconsin Hardy Plant Society (WHPS) sponsors tours of members' gardens. They begin at 4 p.m. and go until dark. Descriptions of the gardens and directions are emailed to the members and you are on your own as to the order you want to visit the gardens in and how long you want to spend at each one. The first visits were held on Tuesday of this week on an evening that could not have been more perfect.

This garden surrounds a small house located on a street corner with no sidewalks. There was not a bare inch of ground other than pathways, patios and the driveway (below).

The gardener says she is trying to lower maintenance by using peonies and lilies. She had an absolutely amazing array of peonies, including tree peonies most of which had already bloomed. If the peonies were labeled I did not see them, so I can't provide any information.

Thursday, February 09, 2017

The first bulbs I bought for the coming season were snowdrops from Carolyn's Shade Garden. They will be delivered "in the green" in March or April, having already bloomed. The other bulbs I ordered elsewhere will get planted this spring and bloom later this season if I'm lucky. The photo below shows the stunning Nectaroscordum tripedale that I planted in 2016. I'm hoping they return again this year.

The Nectaroscordum are growing just to the right of Lilium asiaticum 'Landini. I had hoped the two bulbs might share some bloom time but you can see from the dried up Nectaroscordum flower heads that it did not happen.

I'm hoping I have better luck getting the L. 'landini' to bloom in tandem with my new lily, L. asiaticum 'Forever Susan' which I'm planting across a path from 'landini.' I first saw 'Forever Susan' last summer in my friend Cindy's garden and it was a stunner. Cindy's garden was on the WHPS members' garden tour on the same night as mine last June.

In the second photo from the top you will notice L. leichtlinii in bloom (and bud) on the edges of the picture. They are yellow touched with a bit of orange and I am picking up that combo on the other side of the path as well. I already have L. henrii in place (directly below) and I'm adding L. longiflorum 'Apricot Fudge.'

Bulb connoisseurs Brent and Becky Heath describe 'Apricot Fudge' as a very unusual, "almost rose-like" form. It certainly is not typical looking, judging from the photo on their website (below).

Then I saw this Alstroemeria 'Inca Ice' at Avant Gardens and had to have it. Imagine, an Alstroemeria that's hardy in Zone 5. I only ordered one plant because I haven't a clue what they actually look like growing in a garden. And I will believe it's hardy in this zone when I see it. But look at this baby! It would be a swoon-worthy moment if its bloom time managed to cross that of L. 'Apricot Fudge.'

I've gardened for enough years that I am well aware that flowers rarely bloom on a strict schedule or in concert with other plants the way we hope and plan. That's why I am such a fan of foliage: it looks good all season. Foliage combos always work all the time.

These lilies have dramatic flowers but stems and leaves that don't make a big statement or take up a big space. They can be squeezed in between other plants so they disappear once they've flowered. But one can always hope that perhaps one of these lovely floral matches will prove to be made on earth and not just in my heavenly dreams.

Friday, December 30, 2016

2016 was an ambitious gardening year for both Mark and me with a list of projects and tours that got us off to an early start. The weather, the plants and Mark and I all cooperated to make for a growing season that left us with mostly pleasant memories to get us through the winter. Here's my recap.

NOTEWORTHY WEATHER: Unlike much of the country, we had good weather throughout the seasons along with consistent moisture and few serious weather "events." What this winter will bring no one knows, but many times during the last 12 months I've made myself slow down and acknowledge how lucky we were to enjoy so many lovely days. Here you can see what happens when we get heavy rain in a short time period. The pond overflows in this corner and the dry stream directs the water out to the street along the property line between our house and our neighbors. The water in the stream always soaks in and disappears as soon as the rain lets up.

TOUR TIME: 2016 was the year of the tours. I think the final count was 13 tours in 19 weeks. That included everything from friends visiting from out of town to the Wisconsin Hardy Plant Society to the garden editors from a couple of national magazines. It was fun and rather heady. But perhaps the best thing about it was that it inspired us to complete projects that had been sitting unfinished for years, like dealing with the water and electric lines by the Tea House. At this point, any new projects that get proposed are just the icing on the cake which is a very satisfying feeling.

MAIL ORDER MADNESS: Winter in Wisconsin tends to send this gardener on-line in search of plants: pictures of them, stories about them and catalogs that sell them. 2016 saw me order more plants from more different nurseries than I've ever done before. I used our upcoming garden tours as my excuse. It was a fun, fascinating experience but not something I will do again. I did take advantage of the situation to write about all the nurseries and to do a post on mail order plants: what I learned.

PERFECT PLANT PERFORMANCE: All the new plants I put in in the fall of 2015, like Eremurus, bloomed right on cue. My Ladyslipper Orchid and "Molly the Witch" Peony (below) also bloomed for the first time ever. My first attempt at growing a Dahlia was so successful that I am now hooked on trying more of them.

RAMPAGEOUS RABBITS: It wouldn't be gardening without a few problems. This year the rabbits were everywhere eating everything. Important shrubs and new plants spent much of the season caged for protection. I'd pull the cages off every time we had visitors and they'd go back on the minute the guests got in their cars. When I planted a small group of fall blooming crocus, the bunnies ate the first one that bloomed. I was out of cages and energy so I resorted to covering the clump of flowers with a plastic milk carton. Effective if not exactly charming. My task this winter is to put out Have-a-Heart traps to try to reduce the rabbit population. That and pray that a fox moves into my garden!

NEW ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS: For the first time in many years we did not buy a couple of truckloads of mulch from Olbrich Botanical Gardens. Last Spring, the Gardens put out a notice that they were temporarily suspending the sale with input from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR), the City of Madison, and other invasive species experts. They did this because the DNR recommended that leaves not be moved through Dane County due to the possibility of spreading invasive jumping worms.

Unfortunately many of us who garden in Dane County, including me, have already found the dreaded jumping worms in our gardens. Jumping worm cocoons appear to be able to survive Wisconsin's winters and can be spread through soil, compost, and mulch (hardwood and leaf). When we did our driveway project in 2015 we bought soil and mulch from commercial sources and that may be where the worms in my garden came from. Who knows? But this is a huge issue with the potential for serious habitat destruction. It's the one thing that put a damper on all the great aspects of the 2016 garden year.

Thursday, September 01, 2016

Not long ago I visited a garden in a neighborhood where the houses are close together with garages at the back of the properties. You drive into the garage via an alley. Thus the door you see below opens into the garden from the garage. The white fence divides the garden I was visiting into two rooms and the plants on the right mark the lot line between the houses. This was the view from the garden I was touring. Looks to me like they have a dream neighbor for a gardener!

Thursday, August 04, 2016

I recently went to see a garden in the neighborhood where I lived when I first came to Madison. It was near Brittingham Bay and many of the earliest houses are quite small on small lots as they started life as cottages. I lived around the corner from this garden in the upper apartment of an old house that had been converted into two flats. It was where I first tried my handing at gardening.

This was one of my favorite ideas in the garden I visited. The gardener has a deck that comes off the back of the house and opens to a nice seating/eating area but it required a number of steps to get down to ground level in the garden. So she had long steps built around two sides of the deck as a way to not only walk down to the garden but also to stage and display all her plants in pots.

These pictures are poor quality even for my phone but it's such a good idea that I decided to share them for all of you who love your container gardens. It reminds me of Christopher Lloyd's pots and pots of flowers on display outside his front door but more informal.

Thursday, June 30, 2016

Tuesday afternoon the three of us whose gardens were open last night for touring by members of the Madison Area Master Gardeners and the Wisconsin Hardy Plant Society spent more than three hours wandering though each other's gardens before the big day. Lots of fun and many questions and exclamations!

Last night the first visitors were coming up our driveway moments before 4 p.m. and the last departed around 8:30 p.m. Mark and I were on our feet the entire time talking, laughing, answering questions and generally having a wonderful time. We saw many gardeners whose gardens we've toured over the years as well as neighbors and old friends. Matt Wieneke, who did our driveway/wall, also came by with his family and answered questions and explained how that big project all came together.

Thanks to everyone for their thoughtful remarks and compliments. And special thanks to our two great local gardening organizations who made it all happen.

Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Every summer the Wisconsin Hardy Plant Society has tours of members' gardens, usually three or four in an evening. They are always worth the time because these are created and cared for by gardeners just like the rest of us: amateurs rather than professionals. The size, location, and focus of the gardens vary widely so you never know what you'll see or what ideas you'll come away with. Here are a few of the things that caught my attention on last's week's tours.

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This gardener clipped snapshots of her garden from earlier in the year to trees and shrubs so you could see how the plantings had changed since the beginning of the gardening season.

We don't have a lot of different seating areas in our garden so I took note of all the options some of the gardens offered. This bench with its peeling paint was one of my favorites as it didn't call too much attention to its presence.

Two small water features that each made a big impact in their gardens.

This gardener put the main seating area right out in the garden instead of next to the house. She said her focus was on layout and you could really see it with something like this (seen from both directions below).

At this garden we were all offered chocolate chip cookies as we arrived!

This blue ball caught my eye but what held my attention was realizing how similar true Geranium leaves are to those of Pachysandra. Both are ground covers but Geraniums offer scent and prettier flowers, at least to my eye.